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Saturday, March 29, 2008

Student Pilot Journal Podcast #16

First Solo Cross Country!

This episode of the Student Pilot Journal documents my first successful solo cross country from Valkaria (X59) to Pahokee (PHK). Notice that I said successful. I had previously tried to accomplish it but low ceilings caused me to play it safe and turn around about 15 miles out. Better safe than sorry. I chose to get flight following for the entire CC. I have to say that flight following makes things so much easier. It never hurts to have another set of eyes on your route. This episode only shows the trip to PHK. I forgot to plug the audio cable into the camera when I changed tapes at Pahokee so the trip back was noisy. It was probably a good thing because I started back trying to hook up with Melbourne's VOR at the North side of the lake and soon discovered how flaky the VOR is. I can only imagine what my ground track looked like as I was trying to intercept it. All in all things went very well aside from my Pahokee landing which was way off centerline due to slacking on the sideslip over the runway. Crosswinds are commonplace at Pahokee airport.



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Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Steve Tupper From Airpseed Podcast Visit

Throughout my flight training and this podcast I have been talking back and forth with Steve Tupper from The Airspeed Podcast. Early on I learned what a huge aerospace junkie he was. I never claim to know too much about it myself....hey...I just work there. IT guys can be fairly involved in their work, you know. Forget everything else. :-) Early in the year he had made mention of a planned trip to Kennedy Space Center which is literally just down the street from my office so I offered him a tour of our satellite processing facility at Astrotech. Last week we were able to meet and it was a pleasure to have him. Of course we talked a good bit about flying and then proceeded with the tour. I am sure most of you reading this are well aware of Steve and his podcast, but if you are not please check it out here. He is just as nice in person as he is in the podcast. I hope to meet up with him again in the future. It truly is amazing how you can meet people through the podcasting medium.


Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Student Pilot Journal Podcast #15

Dual Cross Country


This is the video for the dual cross country from Melbourne to Okeechobee. See the blog post from Feb. 15 for details on the flight.


-Greg




Sunday, March 9, 2008

Student Pilot Journal Podcast #14

Night Flying

This was my first introduction to a number of things. Night flying, a Cessna 172, right hand traffic pattern at an unfamiliar airport, and takeoff from a towered airport. The video quality is extremely dark, so in an attempt to make things somewhat better I increased the resolution of the video to 640x480 so you might make out some objects so this is the reason for the larger download. It is still pretty dark, though. There is some good audio for those interested in what is different with night flying.

-Greg

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